NEEDLING

THE MAN IN THE PICTURE

Alright. Sean’s called me to join him for a cup of java at my morning café joint, the one I used to go to not every day but almost when I had a little extra cash that I could afford a daily crème. I introduced him to Les Folies a couple weeks back. Great little place to spend the afternoon sitting on the terrace zoning out right on the trotoire watching life walk by you, in front of you. Smoke a smoke, have a beer, let it slide. So it’s good because otherwise I would probably have spent my whole day off from the hotel in bed listening to music. I woke up early though… I got to clean my studio… all I could manage this morning was to put WFMU on and slide in a hot bath… forty five minute or more later whenever the water was no longer hot, I went back to my bed. I tried hard not to look at my studio. I kept wondering if there’s a way around cleaning it. Nope. Sunday night I’m picking up my mother at the train station. She’s coming back from Bretagne where she was visiting my grandmother. I got her a room at the hotel for half price… still, just in case she wants to come see my studio. I haven’t done the dishes in a few weeks. Some of the trash is in plastic shopping bags, most of it isn’t, empty bottle litter every corner, specially close to my bed, dirty socks and underwear are spread about … et cetera.

There’s been plenty to talk about. It’s that I haven’t felt like it. The day before yesterday, while I was at the train station watching people wait for trains or wait for people on trains, a journalist and a photographer interviewed me on my views on wine consumption in France, French wines, if I drink them et cetera. The next day I had my picture in the paper with a blurb quote. Something I had supposedly said though it wasn’t close to what I said since we talked for over fifteen minutes and the quote was three sentences long. It basically said what I said but in descent French. Succinctly. Crunching a conversation down. Uhm…

Then either yesterday or the day before, three cops in civilian clothes walked into the hotel. I kind of stared at them for a while before I started understanding what the hell they wanted from me. It took me a few seconds to realize they were cops. They didn’t look anything like cops. They were all three women. That shouldn't have anything to do with it but it did somehow. One of them was even nice looking. The first one, the leader, the one in charge, the only one who talked the whole time, flashed her cop I.D. at me telling me who they were. She had to repeat herself. They were going too fast for me. Obviously they had been running from one hotel to another asking the same questions, and they knew their spill by heart. But I didn’t! She dropped a drawing on the counter in front of my face, one of those reproduction police drawings you see on bad television cop shows. I stood up to look down at the drawing. They asked me if I had ever seen this man.

They were in a real hurry and they all three kept staring at me with big frightful police eyes. They were stressing me out. “I’ve never seen this guy, I said… no… I’m sorry, that face doesn’t look like any face I’ve ever seen… or at least I don’t remember it. Sorry.” I kept apologizing. I wanted so bad to help them out for some reason. I don’t know why. They looked so eager. They looked so sure of themselves. They looked so dedicated. So frightfully aware of themselves. But that face of that man on that drawing didn’t look like anything. It could have been a whole set of persons I’ve seen around the hotel and even rented rooms to... and none of them. That drawing was bad. It looked like a generic man. If I’d shaved my head to a millimeter cut, I could have been the man in the drawing. Maybe I should have made the proposition. “Tell you what, I’ll shave my head to a millimeter, this way I can be the man in the picture, whadda you day?”